Accomplished New York City Employment Law Attorneys Fight for Basic Employment Rights for Unpaid Interns

Stopping intern exploitation

Internships are meant to be a means of
fostering real-world growth for students
looking for a little experience and
mentorship. Now, internships for many
companies have become a means of putting
students into the workforce without having
to pay them anything. As the pressure to
gain experience before graduation has
mounted, highly-motivated students have
accepted working for free. At
Hepworth, Gershbaum & Roth, PLLC, our
New York employee rights attorneys have been
increasingly disturbed by the trends in
using unpaid interns to run their
businesses. This exploitation needs to stop.

Determining whether you should be paid for
your internship

The
Department of Labor has an established test
that it uses to determine whether or not an
internship should be paid. Our NYC
employee rights attorneys are successful
in unpaid internship lawsuits because we
have nearly a century of combined legal
experience recovering damages from employers
who have abused their employees. The test
for these cases is highly factually based.
Each of the six factors of the Department of
Labor’s six part test must be proven
convincingly in order to recover damages.
The three most highly contested factors in
these cases are:

Whether the experience was most
beneficial to the intern or the employer

Whether regular full-time employees were
displaced by the internship

Whether there was an immediate advantage
derived from the work that the intern
performed

Deciding to join a class action lawsuit with
other unpaid interns

A
class action lawsuit enables a group of
plaintiffs to collectively recover relief
from the same defendant. In order to get a
class action lawsuit validated by a judge,
the plaintiffs must all have suffered
essentially the same injury from the same
entity. Our New York employee class action
attorneys encourage unpaid interns to
consider this course of action for their
lawsuits. It enables you to recover from
your claims much more quickly and the
strength in your numbers demonstrates the
immorality of your employer’s actions.

Schedule a
free initial consultation today if you are
or were an unpaid intern

Although the definition of an internship has
changed in practice, the definition of a
legal unpaid internship has not. Schedule a
free initial consultation with one of our
NYC employee rights attorneys at Hepworth,
Gershbaum & Roth, PLLC today to discuss your
legal rights as an unpaid intern. An
appointment can be scheduled by calling us
at
212-545-1199 or contact us
online.

CONTACT US

Contact an employment law
attorney in New York today
for a free initial
consultation and determine
whether you have a case. For
a free initial consultation,
you can contact us online or
by phone.